WAVES BREAKING ON BERNARD: TOWARDS A NEW READING OF ‘THE WAVES’

Abstract

By closing The Waves (1931) with Bernard’s extended monologue after presenting a narrative absolutely fragmented by the six voices that pass along with her symbolic day, Virginia Woolf opens us to a new possibility of reading her masterpiece: that of understanding her entire narrative as sustained by its last section and its central character. This essay proposes a backwards reading of Woolf's novel, from the time of the instant (present) to recollected time (past), a reading in accordance with Bernard as the binding thread of her narrative. To do this, we draw a parallel with what Woolf coined as her philosophy in Moments of Being (1941, 1971), her theory about moments of being and of non-being, and the time of the instant, which compresses both past and future into images according to St Augustine in his Confessions. Bernard seems to present us with the waves that come to us from ourselves, our memories and desires, in a movement of inevitable break that begets the human.